IT Spending

Global cloud IT infrastructure revenues hit $8 billion (£6.2bn) in the first quarter of 2017 going up almost 15% year over year – with Cisco the big winners, according to IDC. The analyst firm has put out the latest figures on its Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker (below), and found Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) could not be separated at the top, with Cisco behind.

The two main players saw their revenues dip compared with this time last year; Dell hit $1.289bn compared to HPE with $1.118bn, with a decrease in revenue of 0.2% and 8.6% respectively, while Cisco, in third with $902 million, saw its revenue go up 8.7%. It’s worth noting at this juncture that despite the disparity IDC declares a statistical tie if there is a difference of one percent or less between vendor revenues...

New cloud-based solutions (56 percent) and data security (50 percent) are the key areas of investment for IT departments in the UK this year, according to research. A study of 400 senior IT decision makers from medium and large organisations in the UK, France and Germany has established the main spending priorities of firms.

Cloud solutions are seen as a key investment priority as they enable the simple management of data, documents and applications employees use on their devices. Through cloud computing, businesses are also able to use IT on demand, enabling them to upscale or downsize their computing provision in line with business growth...

Enterprises will spend more than US$235 billion on cloud architecture and services by 2017 — a 35 percent gain from the US$174 billion projected to be spent this year. “Enterprises today are trying to create faster, more efficient I.T. environments to ensure more responsive, agile and successful businesses,” said Jagdish Rebello, senior director for information technology at IHS.

"In these cloud-based settings, enterprises also want to integrate the deep analytical power of big data, which will give them competitive advantages through insights about present and prospective customers." Enterprises are simultaneously augmenting their on-site services and capabilities with the cloud and gradually transferring those functions to online competencies, noted IHS...

Civilian agencies plan to spend more than $2.8 billion on cloud solutions this year, with the vast majority of funding slated for software services hosted in private clouds. About $2.2 billion of those funds will be invested in private cloud models, where infrastructure is provisioned exclusively for an agency, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget.

Planned investments in community cloud total $381 million, or 13 percent of cloud spending this year. Public and hybrid clouds make up a small fraction of spending, 3 percent and 5 percent, respectively. Defense Department data will be released this spring...

While the benefits of cloud computing continue to outshine any potential drawbacks, some IT managers and executives at midsize businesses still take a cautious approach with this new technology. While the needs of businesses differ, some new research, as discussed in a Forbes article, shows that employees are adopting cloud computing services en masse without IT's knowledge. That is a reality that IT managers have to consider when thinking about the cloud, security and their business.

Significant Shadow IT Spending

The new research comes from a Microsoft survey, conducted by 451 Research, of over 2,000 executives from around the world. The focus of the survey was cloud computing and how businesses are adopting the technology now that it has grown into more than just a buzzword...

Research shows that, by 2017, spending on cloud computing services is expected to reach $235.1 billion. A report from consulting firm IHS Technology shows that this prediction is three times higher than the $78.2 billion spent in 2011.

Investment Breakdown

This estimate is one of the highest spending predictions to date, which invites the question of how that money will be spent. According to an article from InfoWorld, those funds will be used for infrastructure, application hosting and data analytics. Most of the spending will be put toward infrastructure, including the migration and computing related to enterprise-to-cloud storage. The use of public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds will see the biggest rise while private cloud growth is expected to spike in the next few years...

The availability of cloud services, and pressure to abide by rules and laws, is having a knock-on effect on firms' storage requirements and leading to more investment in IT storage, according to the results of recent V3 reader research. Forty-one percent of IT professionals taking part in the study said they plan to spend more or the same as last year on storage during 2014. Data growth, regulatory compliance and cloud computing were cited as key drivers for businesses’ storage budget plans.

However, the research revealed that 41 percent of IT professionals "see no need" to upgrade from their current storage approach to newer approaches like converged storage, to get better value from their investments. Converged storage, where storage components and compute hardware are combined into one piece of hardware, is intended to increase the speed of access to important business data, simplify IT administration and offer better value...

The use of cloud computing is growing and by 2016 will account for become the bulk of new IT spend, according to Gartner. “2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017,” Gartner says.

Gartner expects cloud services revenue in Australia to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.3 percent from 2012 to 2017 across all segments of the cloud computing market. It expects software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to have even higher growth rates, 23.6 percent and 24.5 percent respectively...

Reduced demand for information technology has hit the sector like a ton of bricks. Actually, make that BRICs. "One thing that has hurt IT has been the BRIC countries," Oracle's co-president, Mark Hurd, told CNBC on Monday, referring to Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are all deemed to be developing markets for business.

Over the last several years, however, the BRICs had provided considerable demand growth to the IT space, Hurd said. A recent increase in its sales force has helped Oracle have "good performance" in Europe, Hurd said, but the European market overall has been "flattish at best....

Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will reach $47.4 billion in 2013 and is expected to be more than $107 billion in 2017, according to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC). Over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public IT cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent, five times that of the IT industry as a whole.

As one of the key technologies enabling the industry-wide shift to the 3rd Platform, cloud computing has played a crucial role in changing the way companies consume and use information technology. Now, there are signs that cloud services are starting to shift into a "Chapter Two" phase where the scale of cloud adoption will not only be much bigger, but also more user and solution driven. In this phase of growth, cloud and the other 3rd Platform technologies – mobile, social, and Big Data – will become even more interdependent as they continue to drive growth and innovation across all industries that depend on IT...